The Colors of India: Raghubir Singh

Between 1974 and 1999 the late Raghubir Singh published 12 volumes of color photographs taken in various regions of India. At age 58 he had already lay together one of the greatest in quantity productive and best-documented careers in the history of photography. His 13th volume published just before his untimely death last April, is a retrospective selection, River of Colour: The India of Raghubir Singh, which has also been not awayed as an exhibition. The whirl includes a somewhat defensive essay by the agency of Singh that seeks to justify his career in the connection of Indian esthetics. The exhibition was organized by dint of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was seen last spring after opening at the Bon Marche, Paris, in 1998

Singh's works are thematized geographically, either by the agency of state (Rajasthan, 1981; Kashmir, 1983; Kerala, 1987; Tamil Nadu, 1997) through city (Calcutta, 1975, and Calcutta, The place of abode and The Street, 1988; Benares, 1986; Bombay, 1994) by dint of river (The Ganges, Sacred River of India, 1974 and The Ganges, 1992) or by dint of road (The Grand Trunk Road, 1995) Another selection, Kumbh Mela (1981) portrays a massive Hindu pilgrimage. still Singh resisted the notion that these are travel works Interviewed by Max Kozloff (Asian Art, Fall 1989) he noted, "I grew up in India. My basic education has been in India, and I'm photographing them. I mean, I would be on the outside of my mind to diocese that as travel photography. I would say my work is a rejoinder to Indian lives as I diocese them." Yet the issue of lived native experience is not with equal reason simple as that of nationality. single could even question whether someone from Rajasthan isn't essentially a traveler in, say, Tamil Nadu, with its different language, pabulum and customs. Although Singh later disavowed any journalistic intention, he began his career in the late '60 publishing conventional documentary color photographs in National Geographic, Life, austere and the New York Times. His itinerary, flat for a recent book like as Tamil Nadu, could have been devised from a guidebook, on the other hand he always used the region's historical and legendary sites to frame contemporary experiences. And as personal as his photographs undoubtedly are, Singh's mise-en-scenes are nation-scaled and highly variable--unlike, say, the village-universe individual finds in the writer Narayan's work. Singh always insisted upon complete editorial control of his works (except for the dust jacket, on the other hand even there he allowed no cropping). In India's English-language bookstores, however, his volumes are often sold alongside the souvenir books

Singh's career-long use of color, always uninhibited, may contribute to the near volume's coffee-table aura. Although the art world now accepts, or smooth mandates, color in contemporary photography, a subliminal air of vulgarity persists when the color is as extravagant as it is here. "In the Rajput courts of my native Rajasthan, neither art nor life could be imagined without the brilliant plumage of a bird in flight," Singh begins, consciously evoking the exotic, in his introductory essay for the retrospective. Noting Western photography's long-time antipathy for herculean color, he continues, "Color has not at any time been an unknown force in India." Color makes Singh's photographs plenteous too lavish to seem "documentary" in the purest faculty of perception his evident preoccupation with highway photography notwithstanding. At a March 1999 slide-talk at the International Center for Photography, fresh York, Singh commented on an image of a Bombay lane dweller, "I realized fairly early there was no contradiction between sadness or need and color."

Singh began photographing while still a teenager, taking his inspiration from Henri Cartier-Bresson's Indian photographs. He had set a cheaply printed Indian edition of Beautiful Jaipur (1949) upon a family bookshelf. In 1966 when Cartier-Bresson revisited Jaipur, Singh was introduced, and he then followed the photographer for several days, observing him at work. Eventually, Singh visited him in Paris, bringing his hold first two books for appraisal. After leafing [i]or[/i] part of to the other only a few pages, Cartier-Bresson pushed the volumes away. "I knew he had no regard with affection for color photography," Singh writes in his retrospective's introduction. "But this attitude, and my hold fear of failure, made me redo the sum of two units works."

In individual sense, the retrospective continued the revision. River of Colour is organized thematically rather than regionally. Singh always secure from attacked the geographic organization of his works saying that in India cultural exhibition is primarily a function of place. Compared to their counterparts in the proportionately more urbanized West, greatest in quantity Indians live close to the land and its creatures, as Singh not seldom made evident in his work. India's dramatic seasons of drouth and monsoon can destroy everything a somebody owns. Singh's first great assemblage of photographs (including Monsoon rains, Monghyr Bihar, 1967 in River of Colour) was of women in a rainstorm, huddling together in a field. While decrying the Western obsession with death and alienation, Singh insists repeatedly in his writing that geography is fate, and he flat condemns certain unnamed contemporary Indian artists, along with postmodernism itself, for losing this faculty of perception of geographic identity.